Dear Mother,

This is how I dream blue. 

I dream about water.

She balances over the jetty rolled out over the clear, calm ocean.  The tide is out.  She is looking for fish, bent over trying to keep her balance.

There is no life unless it’s blue.

She is thinking of the Turkish toilets in Paris.  She remembers the rain pouring in sheets and moving through the streets slowly.  She’s there hanging over the toilet.  Her back gives out and she’s slapped against the wall, shifting her weight.  The man eyed her with suspicion as she raced to the back of the brasserie looking for the bathroom.  She was a wet dog, dragging her weight toward a hole where she would force all the food, the looking, the crying, the eating, the terrible parts of her outward, into the toilet.  Her mouth is open, gasping like the gargoyles over the sink, spitting water over her hands, cleansing them from the sickness.

Just the night before, she’s sitting in the Madame’s window room, looking over the street watching what happens as the sun starts to go down.  Her sister just phoned, dialing the long string of numbers that would reach her in France.

Mom’s in bad shape.  She won’t stop crying.  She’s on the floor and I don’t know what to do.  She’s really sad.  I’m afraid to leave her alone in the house.  I can’t get her off the floor.

She remembers bathing her in the middle of the night.  Her mother, huge and grossly overweight, still one moment and banging on the ceramic the next.  She kneels on the floor, feeling awkward and angry, pouring water over her naked mother.  She thinks, if she could disappear down the drain like shiny little soap suds, this is what she would do but she wouldn’t do that and leave her mother.  She speaks with soft and comforting words, ravaged and blue, trying to soothe the woman in front of her and her blue eyes too.

link to Trifecta challenge "blue"